Working together on NM09 support and cleaning Solid::Control

[Kevin Kofler]

Will Stephenson wrote:
> Use of NM09 in distros is more interesting and the only distro to have
> shipped in (Fedora) has already done so and has it own solution. The next
> round of distro releases comes in the autumn by which time our NM09 support
> will be complete.

Unfortunately, this is not an accurate characterization of the situation in 
Fedora.

First of all, the Rawhide (our rolling development tree, from which Fedora 16 
will eventually be branched) NetworkManager packages do not and will not 
include the compatibility API. So we need something to put into Rawhide NOW. 
Right now kde-plasma-networkmanagement is completely broken in Rawhide. We're 
going to import a snapshot of the nm09 branch into Rawhide ASAP. This need not 
be perfect (hey, it's Rawhide! ;-) ), but at least it should work to some 
extent, and ideally get fixes actively. I'd also expect other distributions 
targeting a fall release to want to start importing NM 0.9 and the nm09 branch 
of kde-plasma-networkmanagement now rather than in fall; see e.g. the reply 
from the Debian maintainer about the plans for Debian and Ubuntu.

Secondly, in Fedora 15, the situation is as follows:
1. The Fedora NetworkManager package maintainers only guaranteed us that they 
will be maintaining the compatibility API until summer (i.e. June-August, they 
weren't more specific). They expect us to have pushed a kde-plasma-
networkmanagement update which uses the native 0.9 API by then. (The KDE SC 
4.7.0 release was mentioned as a possible date for the switch.)
2. There are other strong reasons why we want to move Fedora 15 to the native 
0.9 API ASAP (even before 4.7.0 if possible!):
(i) VPN support is broken in the NM compatibility interface: 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=699786 and our NetworkManager 
maintainers show no interest in fixing it.
(ii) The compatibility API only supports the exact feature set (modulo broken 
VPN, see above) of the 20110323 snapshot of kde-plasma-networkmanagement. In 
particular, it does NOT support:
* system connections,
* bluetooth tethering,
* anything else added to kde-plasma-networkmanagement after around March 23.
So, since we don't want to expose non-working UI to our users, we are stuck 
with the 20110323 snapshot on Fedora 15, and for upgrade path reasons also on 
Fedora 14. But our users are asking for newer snapshots.
3. Another important thing to consider is that we need to have support for 
properly migrating existing user connections (to connections stored as system 
connections, but set to be private for the user, and with the secrets stored 
per user through the secrets agent interface) before we can push the nm09 
branch builds as an update to Fedora 15. The proposed workaround of manually 
switching the connections to system connections before upgrading is not 
suitable for several reasons:
(i) It does not work on Fedora 15 at all, because the compatibility API does 
not support system connections!
(ii) Even if it did, pushing an update which requires you to manually tweak 
your configuration before updating would not be acceptable.
(iii) It means storing the secrets in systemwide (and thus unencrypted) 
storage, which might not be what you want.

So the recent work on getting the nm09 branch up to task quickly is great news 
to us; having that work be halted in favor of a major refactoring which is 
scheduled to take until fall would be a HUGE problem for Fedora!

Please work on libnm-qt in a separate branch and don't destroy the efforts to 
get something working out ASAP.

        Kevin Kofler